American Income, American Injustice

This is, by the by, the 700th post here on this blog (under different names).  Big Hello to all the Crooks and Liars people following Mike's Blog Round-Up link!  Thank you for stopping by, and please check out the rest of this blog.  Also, I have a separate blog at WittyLibrarian And The Book With the Blue Cover, at which I have a current memorial for Sir Terry Pratchett.)

The federal investigation into the dealings of the Ferguson Police Force, not just in the Michael Brown shooting but a litany of complaints against an out-of-control agency, brought up some horrifying revelations.  Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly titled his article about it "The Gangsters of Ferguson," and for good reason:

(from the DOJ report) Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson’s own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities...

Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue...

There's a word for this: Extortion.

Extortion... is a criminal offense of obtaining money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense...

Thing is, Organized Crime never had it so good or easy as corrupt cops and city employees, who extort through excessive fines and asset seizures using the threat of jail and the threat of police brutality to get their money.  The Mafia ain't got sh-t on a police force that basically fines the hell out of its own citizenry.

And why is this happening?  Why are the police and city governments so eager to shakedown their own communities like a bunch of street thug enforcers and their capos?

Let's ask Chad Staton over at the Washington Monthly:

...What exacerbated such practices is the maniacal hold of anti-tax fervor that has trickled down from the federal level to the state and local level. With conservative domination of many statehouses, its clear to any ambitious politician that wants to advance in the Republican Party that their fealty to the ideal of “no new taxes” has to be iron-clad.

This lock-step discipline on taxes has become a principle unto itself. From the beginning, its support has come as a result of racializing social safety net programs. What we see is a feedback loop occurring post “formal” Jim Crow. Black people are seen as “stealing” the hard earned taxes of white people, who then support politicians pledging to never raise taxes. Revenue is still needed to run the government, however, so we see budgets for programs that benefit everyone slashed. At the municipal level, cities target black communities to make up the gap.

This targeting is then justified by the same logic that was used to rail against taxes in the first place, as we see in the report. Several officials cite African Americans’ lack of “personal responsibility” as justification for targeting them for revenue.

As long as America is under the grip of this circular logic, there will be many cities operating the way Ferguson did...

It's a wonderful cycle, isn't it?  The anti-tax crowd pushes hard to cut income and corporate taxes at the federal and state level that could otherwise fund our cities and counties and states.  The county and city governments, forced to find other sources of revenue yet unable to even consider raising their own taxes lest the anti-tax forces throw them out of office, have to rely on fees and fines to cover the costs of running their low-level government services.  As most cities are home to large groups of ethnic minorities, these cities view the minorities not as people but as statistics.  And meanwhile, those same anti-tax agitators (yes, I'm pointing a finger at you, Fox Not-News crowd) rail their base against those ethnic minorities as an ongoing social and economic threat, making it easier to ignore their suffering.

There's another word, phrase actually, that can be used here: Indentured Servitude.  Ferguson PD and other departments like them across the nation use violence and the threat of ruin to force a persecuted group - a poor minority like Blacks or Hispanics - to fork over money.  In order to recoup those losses, those minorities are forced to work harder or place themselves further into debt, only to have the PD show up and take more money.

I wrote awhile back about the police department in Waldo, FL shutting down.  It's a small, dot-on-the-map town in the northeast corner of Alachua County.  If you lived in Gainesville (GO GATORS) and had to drive to Jacksonville, you'd know about this place... because Waldo was one of the most infamous speed traps in American history.  Waldo was so small and so poor a community that the police force couldn't rely on the locals for shakedowns fines, so they went with a ludicrous speed trap instead that netted the unwary drivers from out-of-state or from parts of Florida that hadn't heard of them.  My dad got nailed driving through there once, he even knew about it and even he couldn't avoid getting caught in the speed trap.

I was caught once in a speed trap on I-4 one weekend morning, with a group of co-workers leaving a night shift job.  Our driver was accused of being 20 MPH over the speed limit, but she was driving off an expressway ramp onto the interstate having just left the toll booth and there was no way she had accelerated that quickly to the spot the cops pulled us over.  The Orange County deputy claimed an overhead plane was using some form of radar to track us, which was hard to believe because there were no planes overhead (it was a clear morning sky).  As he issued the ticket he bragged that he "always showed up in court to enforce the ticket" and essentially tried intimidating the entire minivan.  Meanwhile a small division of cop cars were swerving backwards on the interstate to reset themselves to catch more "speedsters," driving more recklessly than any civilians they were hoping to ticket.

We all openly questioned the validity of what those county cops were doing.  I argued the Waldo example, that the county was making some damn ticket quota to grind money out of the local drivers.  "It's worse than that," one of the ladies in the back seat told me.  "The cops are also looking for any undocumented workers they can pull in for immigration arrests.  If they do that, it's like a bonus."

These are just two examples of abusive, money-obsessed police actions I've been aware of my whole life over decades of having lived here in Florida.  How do you think this is like for a Black woman living in Ferguson having to cope with this sh-t five times a week? Via Coates' article:

...In one March 2012 email, the Captain of the Patrol Division reported directly to the City Manager that court collections in February 2012 reached $235,000, and that this was the first month collections ever exceeded $200,000. The Captain noted that “[t]he [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today. Since 9:30 this morning there hasn't been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The City Manager enthusiastically reported the Captain’s email to the City Council and congratulated both police department and court staff on their “great work.”

How fares a society when we look at the institutions sworn to uphold the law and protect the citizenry... and see only bullies and shakedown artists?  Out of all the "good cops" we are repeatedly told are out there doing the hard honest work, why are the bad cops who make the Corleones look like saints the ones representing the entire profession?

And this is part of the problems we've been having with asset forfeiture, a program that's been in violation of the very concept of the Fourth Amendment (and even the Eighth and Fourteenth).

Here's the real problem: our cities and counties are tapped out of revenue sources.  Without many states able or eager to raise revenues through a progressive taxation plan - indeed with many of those states eager to cut taxes even further as part of the Far Right agenda of "kill government, let the free market overcharge us" - these cities and counties are going to raid their own communities through abusive tactics.  If we want to end these tactics, we're going to have to as a nation recognize that taxation exists for a reason and that using taxes to pay for public services is a just and fair practice.

Otherwise, the price we're going to pay for all these tax cuts for the rich and powerful will be our communities falling apart. 

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There Is No Accountability For Being Wrong

I have to admit it was the headline that grabbed me.

Washington Is a Cesspool of Faux-Experts Who Do Bad Research.

As a librarian, this kinda pisses me off (per Conor, who's standing on the sidelines chewing the popcorn):

Drawing on nine years in the nation's capitol, Klein acknowledges one class of obstacles. "Washington is a cesspool of faux-experts who do bad research (or no research)," he explained, "but retain their standing by dint of affiliations, connections, or charisma." Sweet validation! I've often suspected that official Washington is populated by enough disingenuous, misinformation-spreading hucksters to fill an underground container of organic waste. No one has better standing to render this judgment than Klein, whose earnest, tireless embrace of deep-in-the-weeds wonkery is unsurpassed in his generation. He wouldn't assert a whole cesspool of intellectual waste product without having seen plenty of specific examples...

They're basically talking about the same set of experts who circle about the DC Beltway getting on the talk shows and getting into the think tank meetings.  They're the same idiots fear-mongering about foreign policy woes and the threats of inflation and wage increases would have against our austerity measures.  Klein and Conor are talking about the same idiots who get proven wrong - constantly, hi there Mr. Kristol - and yet even with a clear track record of failure keep getting invited back by the power elites and the media chains to sell even more faulty intel and questionable opinions.

Paul Krugman - Nobel Prize economist and someone who tends to do the research we librarians like - has been railing against the same faux-experts in the economic circles who keep obsessing over an inflationary threat that never comes: "The predicted surge in inflation has never arrived, but despite being wrong year after year, hardly any of the critics have admitted being wrong, or even changed their tune."

While Krugman worries about the effects that collective ignorance has on our economic recovery (or lack thereof), the thing he hints at but never openly states in that article is how those false predictors are allowed to keep shilling their bad advice. It's because those bad advisors have been in the Inner Circle of power in DC, and once you've been there your advice is always welcome, whether it's factual or not.

There is no accountability for being wrong.  The First Amendment as currently interpreted does not require fact-checkers and enforcement of sticking to the facts.  Whatever Fairness Doctrine we had as oversight for our media gave way to Anything Goes As Long As It's Not Libel (and even then libel is horribly under-enforced).  Journalism as a profession does not require much in the way of certification outside of a bachelors degree and even then it's not a requirement to get hired - just look at Sean Hannity, he doesn't even have a college degree in anything - and there's no association or bar or board of authority to govern how journalists or media outlets can behave.

Your plumber is better vetted than your TV news host.  And if your plumber does something wrong, he/she can lose his/her license.  If your TV news host does something wrong, he/she gets a freaking book deal.  If your TV news host keeps inviting a know-nothing or naysayer talking head who keeps getting the facts spectacularly wrong, that news host will get a contract extension because "it's good for ratings!"  /headdesk

As Raptavio notes on his Daily Kos blog:

With any semblance of real consequence for being so wrong (even willfully wrong) so consistently, there's little incentive for media outlets to pursue accuracy or integrity in their journalism -- and with the phenomenon of market share going to news outlets who present stories and analysis that reflect their audience's biases, this gives the media strong pecuniary disincentives to promote the values of fact-based reporting and instead to pander, irrespective of whether that pandering is grounded in reality.

Dear Beltway Media: stop interviewing (k)no(w)-nothing Senators and billionaire campaign blowhards, and start interviewing librarians and people who are, you know, ACTUAL EXPERTS on the topics being discussed.  You're not doing this nation any favors in your pursuit for ratings over BS.

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It's Schadenfreude Time: Crooks In Virginia Edition

Yesterday's post was about a court ruling that angered me: not the ruling itself, but the bastards - BP Corporation - being held to account for their reckless greed and destruction.

There was another ruling that day that amused me: because it was ex-Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell's jury finding him and his wife guilty on various counts of bribery, corruption, and sheer arrogance.

So now I'm getting around to the schadenfreude portion of this blog.  This is the part of the malicious enjoyment where I lean my head back and guffaw.  A deep, throaty, almost maniacal laugh.  Kinda goes like this:

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

McDonnell is... was... one of those defendants where the sympathy train left the station years ago.  An up-and-coming Republican pol from Virginia, with enough charisma to swoon a room full of fund-raisers and a background catering to the social conservative platform of "family values" (aka Full-Me(n)tal Patriarchy, Pro-Fetus agenda).  He lucked into the national stage as a successful governor of a swing state, able to retain his Far Right credentials yet position himself in public as the "sane and normal" one when compared to his fellow Virginian wingnuts (Hi, Cuccinelli!).  This was a guy getting vetted for being Veep in 2012.  This was a guy who could have parlayed his position into a front-runner for (what is turning out to be wide-open for Republicans) the Presidential ticket in 2016.

This was a guy who couldn't figure out how to keep his corruption on the down-low and in the back rooms.  I mean, corruption is a bad thing no matter which politician is committing it, but there's something to be said about being savvy enough to keep it off the radar...

The feds were able to catch McDonnell's family hanging around with a deep-pocket fund-raising buddy (Jonnie Williams), not only taking money and gifts from him but also turning around and avidly promoting their buddy's diet supplement company.  While Quid Pro Quo is painfully rampant in modern politics, most other politicians tend to be a little more subtle about their deals.

The trial just finished was a soap opera drama worthy of a Lifetime Channel miniseries.  Rather than present a unified defense, Bob and his wife Maureen decided on a finger-pointing approach of accusing each other of being manipulated by a sweet-talking businessman who took advantage of a crumbling, loveless marriage.  Bob especially went with a "crazy wife" defense that essentially threw Maureen under the bus (figuratively, but if someone brought a bus to the front of the courthouse he well could have tried it literally).  For a politician who once stood on the virtue of a husband "defending and providing for his family," this was pretty hypocritical.  It was also pretty tone-deaf.

But the signs were there early: when first charged, McDonnell was offered a plea deal on just one felony charge (meaning minimal jail-time) that would have included all charges on his wife getting dropped (it's a standard practice by prosecutors to pile on charges to make sure a deal can get enforced made).  Even then, McDonnell said no to the deal, figuring he was better off winning over a jury and walking away clean.

Turns out the prosecutors were able to win more than one felony conviction after all.  Hindsight can be a pain, right Gov?

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

As Jim Newell at Salon noted, How could McDonnell be so stupid?:

...In modern politics, corruption charges are usually more tediously complex: Money was wired here and then laundered via a pass-through, which made its way through another pass-through and was distributed through a foundation before ending up at a nonprofit designed to help such and such’s interests with a client trying to change regulations in foreign markets, or whatever. Not in this case. The prosecution just had to show the jury images of the idiot governor showing off his flashy watch that was given to him by the rich businessman for whom he did favors in return. How much simpler could this get? It’s only a degree of reality or two away from an old-timey political cartoon of a tuxedoed plutocrat, smoking a cigar, handing over a big bag marked “$$$,” to a crooked politician slapping his back and cackling.

God, the stupidity...

...Because the defense — the now infamous defense — that they took in court reeked of desperation all the way through. If you’re willing to testify for days about the stunning levels of dysfunction in your marriage, as the best hope for your exoneration, doesn’t that suggest that you may not have the strongest case? Doesn’t that suggest that perhaps you would’ve been better taking a plea deal? It didn’t even cohere...

I would argue it wasn't stupidity.  It was arrogance.  Hubris, the Greek word for Pride: Pride, the highest of the seven deadly Christian sins.  You'd think a rock-solid self-promoting Christian like McDonnell would have learned about the price of Pride in Sunday schools.  That it leads to one hell of a fall.

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Gerrymander And The Contempt of the Florida Legislature

Previously on Gerrymandering Florida, the judge that ruled against the state legislature's blatant partisan district-making for the federal congressional seats ordered that legislature to hold a special session and redraw the affected districts to adhere to the state's Fair Districts amendments.  Said maps were being redrawn for use this year's midterms, which could mean a delay in the affected districts (and perhaps the whole state's primary and general elections).

There wasn't much expected out of this court order, though.  Personally, I had little hope that the state legislature - ruled by Republicans - would play by the rules and draw districts that were compact and based not on registered voters/ethnic makeup but on population density.  After all, these were the same jokers who drew the 5th Congressional District as this long snake-like gerrymander in the first place: they wanted to shove as many Democrats into that one district so they could craft six surrounding districts to favor Republicans.

So, to no surprise at all, the legislature presented to the judge their revised district maps.  Which is: they didn't change much of anything! (via Talking Points Memo)

...But the new maps look quite like the old ones, especially the boundaries of the snakelike District 5, one of the most gerrymandered seats in the country. In his ruling earlier this summer, Federal Judge Terry P. Lewis said District 5 “does not follow traditional political boundaries” and “connects two far flung urban populations” without legal justification. His opinion chided lawmakers, saying districts containing “finger-like extensions, narrow and bizarrely shaped tentacles, and hook like shapes…are constitutionally suspect and often indicative of racial and partisan gerrymandering...”

The revised districts still carve out a snaking thin 5th District between Jacksonville, half of Gainesville (the eastern half where most Blacks and college students live) down to the northern half of the Orlando metro.  The new map does nothing about those "finger-like extensions" that exist among most of the districts, clear efforts by the party in charge to carve out favorable "safe" districts rather than allow communities, cities and counties to speak with one unified voice.

To which I say: can Judge Lewis hold the entire Republican contingency sitting in the Florida legislature with contempt of court?  At least that redistricting committee?

The powers-that-be in the state legislature were given instructions, and a clear understanding from the judge that he was expecting a cleaner, rule-abiding map.  They refused: they intentionally made minor tweaks and are basically daring Lewis to accept what they're offering.

Judge Lewis shouldn't accept it.  He should hold them accountable: for violating the state constitution, for violating their oath of office, for displaying this level of open contempt for his court rulings.

If he's empowered to do so, Lewis should get an independent map-maker on this, get another redistricting map drawn up for Florida's congressional districts and set that map for use.  If not, if he's forced to require the state legislature to make the redistricting map, then he ought to make certain those bastards play by the rules and make a congressional district map that's compact, centered out evenly to our population centers, and unbiased to party alignment.

The state legislature's argument that they have to make the 5th District a "minority" district to abide by the Voting Rights Act requirements for minority representation doesn't make sense when you consider most urban communities are minority, and already effective areas to create such districts in the first place.  The bloggers over at Addicting Info went and did their own redistricting maps, and found that by following the compactness rule and population density without any other bias they could create six congressional districts with heavy minority (Black and/or Hispanic) voting blocs.  We still end up with evenly mapped out districts, not ones that are snaking over six different counties and splitting cities and communities.

This is what Addicting Info's compact and fair districts map looks like.  See anything?  Yeah.  NO GERRYMANDERS.

What the Republicans in the Lege are trying to do is carve out controlled, party-friendly districts, which violates the core values of our electoral process.  It also violates the whole idea behind the Fair District Amendments to make compact, community-focused districts.

The state legislature is pretty much breaking the law right now.

That's the sort of thing that's supposed to involve criminal charges, jail time, fines, something, ANYTHING to uphold the laws of the land.

To Judge Lewis, I urge you to hold the irresponsible leadership of the state Republican-controlled legislature in contempt of your court.

And I urge voters, in spite of our gerrymandered districts, to get up and GET OUT THE DAMN VOTE and to vote the Republicans OUT OF THE STATE LEGISLATURE.  Just DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN, people.  PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD...

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Meanwhile in Florida, Another Gripe About Gerrymanders

(update: hello to the readers visiting via Crooks and Liars.)
I mentioned on my last post I had several things worth blogging, and this was one: a follow-up of sorts from the Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano about the gerrymander trial and a realization he made about how screwed up our electioneering is:

...Nearly one-third of the candidates for 140 Senate and House seats are running unopposed. You think that sounds bad? Pffft, that just scratches the surface.

Dozens of other races offer only the appearance of competition with write-in, third-party and no-party affiliated candidates on board. No disrespect intended to those folks, but it has been decades since anyone booked passage to Tallahassee via that route.

All of which brings us to the bottom line:

There are a grand total of 57 races out of 140 that include both a Republican and a Democrat. Fifty-stinking-seven!

That means nearly 60 percent of the legislative races in November are slam dunks. And only a handful of the other 40 percent will actually turn out to be competitive.

In other words, your American Idol vote will probably carry more weight...

This is what gerrymandering does in the pursuit of creating "safe" districts. Enough of these districts are so skewed to favor one party that the opposing major party doesn't even want to waste the resources to challenge the incumbent that's usually sitting in said district.

More from Romano:

The maps are drawn to have predetermined outcomes in elections. Republicans have given themselves enough safe districts to ensure they will remain in power, and they have given Democrats just enough safe districts to keep them from complaining.

So who loses?

You.

Instead of getting multiple choices of candidates who have a legitimate chance to win, you are stuck with take-it-or-leave-it elections.

The bigger problem is you have already made it clear you were tired of this sham. Florida voters overwhelmingly approved constitutional amendments that forbid the Legislature from just this kind of district stacking when maps were redrawn for 2012.

And yet the problem is only getting worse.

In 2010, the last election under the old maps, 51.7 percent of the races failed to field both a Republican and a Democrat. In 2012, the first year of new maps, that percentage rose to 54.3. Right now, barring anyone dropping out, it's 59.2 percent.

So that means the legislative leaders who were specifically instructed to redraw maps to make them more competitive may have actually made them more lopsided.

Which is easy to believe if you listened to the testimony of deleted emails, consultants being invited to the table and a phantom map falsely submitted under a student's name...

Just on those points alone, the judge overseeing this case ought to dump the GOP's redistricting maps (and for good measure hold each of the con artists responsible for it for contempt).

Romano notes how the general electorate has grown disgusted by the gerrymandering, about how state amendments forcing better redistricting were passed in popular referendum, but that's not the only emotion these gerrymandered maps create.

These maps also create disillusionment and disinterest.  When voters tend to get confronted with elections that have no consequences or value, when voters are pretty much told they have no choices for them to make, they tune out and refuse to show up.  Voter turnout for these mid-term elections - where nothing is at stake in 60 percent of the districts - is hideous, barely topping out over 39 percent and sometimes barely getting over a quarter of all registered voters (when real competitive races take place like the Presidential ones, voter turnout at least breaks over the 55-60 percent mark).

At best 39 percent turnout, people.  That's not a majority of registered voters.  That's not enough residents in this state electing people to office who have the power to dictate business regulations, quality of schools, quality of the local roads and bridges, our environment, any kind of local or national jobs bills that could stimulate the local/national economy... and so on.

We're not ruled by majority vote, we're ruled by the extremists who are the only ones who care enough to vote no matter what.  And those extremists - especially the ones on the Republican side - don't care if government works or not, they just want their special interests protected at all hazards...

This is what gerrymandering creates: lack of honest-to-God representation of the majority's best interests.  It creates disgust in the entire political process.

Gerrymandering has to go if we have any hope of making government at the local, state, and federal levels work again.

That judge better rule against these maps and make certain honest, competitive maps get installed right quick.

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The Only Thing To Say About Dick Cheney

Considering the former Vice President's recent hypocritical and vile comments about Obama's handling of the Iraqi mess Cheney left behind, about the prolonged history of Cheney's lies and distortions, about the thousands of lives broken and killed under his orders, there is only one thing to say:

Arrest the son of a bitch for war crimes and shove his goddamn criminality back into his goddamn face.

That's all that needs to be said now and forever.  No more television interviews.  No more speaking events.  No more book deals.  Send him to jail, put him on trial.  Make him answer for the torture regime, the lies about WMDs, the war-profiteering, the folly of waging two wars with massive debt and without end.

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The Game Is Rigged

If Citizens United weakened campaign laws into a mass lump of jelly, the current McCutcheon decision from the Supreme Court pretty much kills off the rules altogether.

The remarkable story of how we have come to privatize political corruption in this country reached another milestone today as the Supreme Court, John Roberts presiding, handed down its decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, effectively demolishing the aggregate, two-year limit on contributions by individuals, and taking a big chunk out of Buckley v. Valeo, the misbegotten 1976 decision that got the ball rolling in the first place. It was a 5-4 vote, with the court split exactly as it had in the Citizens United case...

...Roberts writes: Significant First Amendment interests are implicated here. Contributing money to a candidate is an exercise of an individual's right to participate in the electoral process through both political expression and political association... The Government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse... The aggregate limits do not further the permissible governmental interest in preventing Quid Pro Quo corruption or its appearance...

The thinking from Roberts and his fellow conservative Justices (the vote split 5-4 between Republican-chosen Justices and Democratic ones) seems to be that since they don't see any specific instances of Quid Pro Quo (Latin for I Scratch Your Back If You Scratch Mine) then there's no corruption at play here, ergo campaign money is not bribery.  They WANT to think money (which isn't free) is equal to free speech (which you shouldn't pay for).

But here's what happens in the real world now: a billionaire can cough up a sizable amount of money - say, $10 million, which is freaking pocket change to a billionaire - and put a lot of that into a SuperPAC... and now a good amount of those millions towards direct contributions that the political candidate for office needs to run an election campaign.  That billionaire is coughing up that $10 million with the expectation that the person(s) the billionaire is(are) backing will win... and will represent that billionaire's interests when the time comes to vote on key legislation.  The politicians know who it was that brought 'em to the dance floor, so they'll play ball and make their vote count for that billionaire... despite the possibility that vote goes against the interests of the 150,000 people from their district or the 18 million people from their own state.

It's one of the reasons why West Virginia is so f-cked up with its waters getting polluted by the coal industry owners: the politicians (both Republican and Democrat) are so beholden to those company owners that they've deregulated every safety guideline in the books... and ended up with polluted drinking water that's STILL making thousands of residents sick.  With long-term effects - cancer especially - still a huge factor.

As Pierce notes in his Esquire article: Four days after almost every Republican candidate danced the hootchie-koo in Vegas to try and gain the support of a single, skeevy casino gazillionnaire, the (SCOTUS) majority tells us that there is no "appearance of corruption" in this unless somebody gets caught putting a slot machine in the Lincoln Bedroom on behalf of Sheldon Adelson.

Sheldon Adelson has about a hundred politicians knocking at his door and sucking up to his political wants.  He's got billions of dollars.  Me?  There is no one knocking at my door and listening to my political wants (a jobs stimulus bill and fair wages, plus cheaper and faster Internet), because I'm making under $35,000.00 a year.  The most I get is the constant emails from Obama's OFA begging for another round of $50.00 I try to pass on every other year (and something that I can't even afford to donate right now).  See the difference, Justice Roberts?  I may have the free-speech ability to say what I want here on this blog and elsewhere on Facebook and on Ta-Nehisi Coates' open threads, but nobody in Congress even knows I'm here because I'm not waving a $20,000.00 check at their campaign handler.  This isn't fair or equal.  What's my $50 compared to Adelson's $10 million?

Molly Ivins kept warning us "It's not what's illegal that's the problem, it's what legal that should scare you."  She quoted that line once discussing how it was common in her Texas legislature (it might STILL BE) for businessmen to walk on the floor during a vote handing out blank checks to legislators voting on something those businessmen wanted.  What the Supreme Court has done has been to make it legal for the rich - the billionaire trust-funders, the megacorporations - to pay for easier access to the elected officials on the floor of the US House and Senate who will be indebted to the ones who paid their way.  And that easy access dictates how the government addresses its issues.  If a billionaire wants the politicians he gave money to promoting the cutting of taxes on the uber-rich, we're gonna see those politicians promoting the cutting of taxes on the uber-rich despite the majority of voters from those politicians' districts screaming "hey, we NEED you to tax the rich.  They're the only ones who can afford it anymore."

The Supreme Court is not seeing any corruptive Quid Pro Quo because they're not using goddamn common sense to see it.  Roberts and his Right-leaning cohorts are sticking to a narrow definition of corruption that doesn't apply to what's really going on. They can't see that Congress isn't focusing on the issues that the voters want - JOBS AND MORE JOBS AT BETTER WAGES - and they can't see that Congress is focusing on what the uber-rich want - TAX CUTS AND DEREGULATIONS that we've seen over the last 20 years don't effing work.

Elections are not a non-partisan, democratic process anymore in the United States.  Elections now are a billion-dollar industry, lacking any regulation or protection from corruption.  It's become legalized bribery all because the Supreme Court majority doesn't want to see it.

The only thing that can save us now is voting out the politicians most likely in the pocket of the uber-rich (hint: they tend to have an R bracketed between their name and their district/state).  But with gerrymandering and voter restriction attempts, that's not likely.  And with dismal Democratic voter turnouts in midterms... well...

This is why I keep screaming at you Dems to GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT.  And I'm not the only one screaming, I know.  So will you, Democrats?  WILL YOU FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT?  It is the only way to defeat the Roberts Court's intent to make this nation a kleptocracy.

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Here's a Bad Launch of a Website, Fellahs

For all the griping done about the HealthCare.gov launch fiasco of three months ago, it has nothing on how bad the redesign and launch of the website (once FLUID, now CONNECT) accessing Florida unemployment benefits went.

A week before the botched launch of Florida's new unemployment benefits website, state senators grilled an agency chief and heard no warning about the chaos to come.

The CONNECT project was well managed and extensive testing showed system failure was unlikely, said Tom Clendenning, director of the Department of Economic Opportunity's workforce services.
"This has been carefully planned out," Clendenning said, smiling broadly during an Oct. 9 Senate hearing. "You can never be too 100 percent bulletproof, so we do have a contingency if in fact the new system isn't ready."

Six days later, the $63 million CONNECT website launched so riddled with technical glitches that it has left thousands of unemployed Floridians without the money they need for food, rent and bills.

The problems were so bad that the DEO began fining the contractor $15,000 a day and federal officials intervened, convincing the state to pay the back claims so claimants could get their money. Two months after CONNECT's debut, so many claims remained unpaid that the DEO hired an extra 330 employees, at a cost of $165,000 a week...

The only good thing that could be said about this disaster was that at least 330 new jobs were filled, however temporary.

...The main contractor of the project, Deloitte Consulting, won the bid to modernize Florida's unemployment compensation system by beating out nine other firms. In early 2011, the company negotiated with Florida that it could do all the work for $39.8 million and finish by December 2012, a deadline it blew — badly. (note: the rollout was finally done in October 2013, which tells you how bad)

As contracts go, this wasn't a big one for Deloitte Consulting, a U.S. company that's part of an international British conglomerate better known as Deloitte & Touche. Since 2007, Deloitte Consulting has won $283.4 million in contracts with Florida agencies.

Its interests are protected by one of the most powerful lobbyists in Tallahassee, Brian Ballard, a major campaign fundraiser for Gov. Rick Scott and other GOP officials...

Nah, nothing to see here, just another living-off-the-government-teat private firm allied with a political party that's openly accusing the unemployed of being lazy free-loaders.  Nothing to see, move along move along...

...McCullion put Deloitte on notice that the contract would be terminated unless an agreement was reached on how to conclude the project, alluding to the company's problems in other states, such as California, New Mexico and Massachusetts, with launching a similar system for unemployment benefits.

"Deloitte's demonstrated inability to implement the solution in other jurisdictions has undermined the (DEO's) confidence that Deloitte will successfully complete the (project)," McCullion wrote on June 15, 2012. "The Department contracted for a viable, proven solution. It now appears that the Department is being asked to fund a software development project with limited prospects for success."

One week later, though, the DEO approved Deloitte's final design. On July 13, Deloitte and the DEO signed a new agreement that stated the contractor has "demonstrated its willingness and ability to perform in adherence to the contract terms and condition."

By the time Panuccio, a lawyer by training with no administrative experience, became DEO executive director in 2013, Deloitte again began submitting expensive cost requests...

At the library where I work, we have a constant flow of patrons coming in to file for benefits.  Ever since the launch of the CONNECT system, I haven't seen that many of them: I'm wondering how many of them were so discouraged by the foul-ups that they stopped even trying (or if they went to the One-Stop employment centers for direct help).

As someone who was long-suffering in the job-hunting process between 2009 to 2013, I can tell you the benefits I got from the unemployment funds helped.  Not enough to cover things like a mortgage and car repairs (that fell upon my parents, and damn I owe them a lot more than just the money), but enough to keep me out there on a daily basis looking for work and interviewing for openings.

For the state of Florida to pay out such an important project to a company that had shown a poor history of website design and launching... for them to pay out to a company tied in deep to the dominating political party of both the state legislature and the governor's office... for letting this go MONTHS to such an extent that the feds have to step in to try and fix things...  This story is a bigger scandal than how it's being told.  This is a disaster that has been decades in the making, as the Republicans have been the dominant party since the 1990s and have developed enough rot and corruption to have this state on the verge of collapse...

It's not just this website rollout that's been a nightmare.  There's been a lot of other disasters that our state legislature are failing to address, that our governor's office is choosing to ignore.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, FLORIDA.  Stop voting Republican.  You're just encouraging the rot.

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